Quotes about Perception

We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.

the same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.

they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth?

and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.